This book explores the impact of the 1917 Revolution on factory life

to transform the economic and social bases of society, without having
recourse to a political state, to a government or to a dictatorship of any sort.
That is, to achieve the Revolution and resolve its problems not by political or




statist means, but by means of natural and free activity, economic and social,
of the associations of the workers themselves, after having overthrown the last
capitalist government.²⁷

There is no evidence that this was the aspiration of any but a handful

in the Petrograd labour movement. Almost nothing in the practice of
the factory committees suggests that they rejected the concepts of
state power, political struggle or a centrally-planned economy.
William Rosenberg is surely correct in his judgment that ‘the
overwhelming mass of Russian workers lacked this [i.e. syndicalist]
outlook, as well as organisations, literature and activists anxious to
cultivate it’.²⁸ In what follows it is hoped to demonstrate that the
movement for workers’ control, far from aiming at an anarchist
utopia based on factory communes, was, in its initial stages at least,
concerned with the far more practical aim of limiting economic
disruption, maintaining production and preserving jobs.

workers’ control as a response to economic chaos

The revolutionary process of 1917 can only be understood in the

context of a growing crisis of the economy. Western historians have
been so mesmerised by the astonishing political developments of this
annus mirabilis, that they have failed to see the extent to which a crisis
in the economy underpinned the crisis in politics, or the extent to
which the struggle to secure basic material needs provided the motive
force behind the radicalisation of the workers and peasants. As early
as 1916 there were alarming signs that Russia was heading towards
economic calamity, but it was not until the summer of 1917 that the
economic crisis fully manifested itself. The chief symptoms of the
crisis were severe shortages of food, fuel and raw materials. Produc-
tion of coal, iron and steel had plummeted, and such fuel and raw
materials as were being produced were failing to reach the centres of
industrial production owing to the breakdown of the transport
system. Petrograd was particularly hard hit, since it was isolated on
the Western seaboard of the Empire, far away from the sources offuel
and raw materials in the South. By September the output of
manufactured goods throughout Russia had fallen by 40% since the
beginning of the year.²⁹ Shortages, spiralling costs, declining labour
productivity and the heightened tempo of class conflict made
industrialists reluctant to try to maintain output. Increasingly, they
faced the stark choice of bankruptcy or closure.




The policy of workers’ control of production was first and foremost
an attempt by factory committees to stem the tide ofindustrial chaos.
Throughout its brief life, the workers’-control movement made a
valiant attempt to maintain production amid mounting economic
chaos. The impulse behind the movement, far from being ideological,
was initially practical. It was the works committee at Putilov which
first took steps to call a conference of factory committees in Petrograd
in May. It discussed the idea with the bureau of factory committees
under the Artillery Administration, and since it could not raise
sufficient funds from the Putilovtsy to finance the conference, secured
the necessary money from the Bolshevik factory committee at the
Parviainen works.³⁰ The purpose of the conference was outlined in
the opening speech by the SR, V.M. Levin:

All the works and factories of Petrograd are experiencing a crisis, but
management do not display any activism in supplying their factories with a
sufficient quantity of raw materials and fuels. As a result, workers may be
thrown to the mercy of Tsar Hunger, unemployed. Therefore, it is the
workers themselves who must show activism in this sphere, since the
industrialist-employers are not showing any. Only the unified organisation of
factory committees, not only in Petrograd but throughout Russia, can do this.
It is obvious that to do this, there must everywhere exist workers’
organisations which must band together to intervene in industrial life in an
organised manner.³¹

The Conference went on to discuss the state of industry in Petrograd;

control and regulation of production and the flow of production in the
factories; the tasks of the factory committees; unemployment and the
demobilisation of industry; the role of the factory committees in the
trade union movement; their relation to labour exchanges and
cooperatives and, finally, the creation of a unified economic centre,
attached to the Central Bureau of Trade Unions.³² The Second
Conference of Factory Committees (7-12 August) reflected the same
practical economic concerns although it also discussed politics. On its
agenda were three key questions: firstly, the economic state of the
enterprise (fuel, raw materials, food supplies and the state of
production); secondly, the current situation and the tasks of workers’
control; thirdly, unemployment, the evacuation of the factories and
the demobilisation of industry.³³

Historians, such as F.I. Kaplan, argue that what was said at

factory committee conferences was one thing, but that what was done
by the committees in the enterprise was quite another. In the majority
of factories, however, the key concern of the committees in the early
stages was to keep production going rather than to establish workers’




self-management. On 8 November the factory committee at the
Franco-Russian engineering works sent a letter to the company which
began: ‘Production and the normal life of the factory are the chief
work and concern of the committees.’³⁴ And the works committee at
the Sestroretsk armaments plant claimed: ‘Since the first days of our
work we have stood by the view that our main aim is the task of
maintaining production in the factory come what may .. ,’³⁵ In order
to establish the fact that for most factory committees workers’ control
was a question of survival, rather than of utopian aspiration, it is
worth looking in detail at the two areas in which factory committees
first exercised ‘control’, viz. the utilisation offuel and the utilisation of
raw materials.

The fuel shortage affected all industrial establishments in Petro-

grad, but large factories were particularly hard-hit. Both the Second
Conference of Factory Committees and the First All-Russian Confer-
ence of Factory Committees in October discussed the critical fuel
situation, but it was at grass-roots level that the most active work
went on. As early as March and April factory committees at the
Vulcan and Putilov works began to search out fuel supplies.³⁶ At the
Nevskii shipyard management protested at the officious way in which
the factory committee monitored production, but on 10 May told the
committee that unless it could find fresh supplies of oil, certain shops
would have to close. The committee agreed to try to find fuel in order
to avert closure.³⁷ From early summer onwards, factory committees
at the Pipe works, the Arsenal, Rozenkrantz and elsewhere began to
send ‘pushers’ (tolkachi) to the Donbass and other parts of Southern
Russia in search of fuel.³⁸ At the Putilov works the fuel shortage was
especially acute; the works committee set up a fuel commission which
sent ‘pushers’ to the coal and oil-producing areas, but they came back
empty-handed; by autumn output at the factory had slumped to a
third of its normal level. The works committee thereupon created a
technical commission to effect the conversion of some of the furnaces
from mineral fuel to firewood. On 20 October the committee wrote to
the Special Commission on Defence, requesting information on fuel
supplies in Petrograd and offering to take care of deliveries, but the
Commission could offer them little.³⁹ The Central Council of Factory
Committees announced that it would requisition fuel from any
factories which had more than three months supply in order to give it
to power stations, water-works and flour-mills where it was most
needed.⁴⁰

Most factory committees busily monitored stocks of raw materials

and incoming and outgoing supplies. In April the Cartridge works
committee requested a weigh-scale to check materials coming into the
factory.⁴¹ On 7 April a general meeting at the Kebke tarpaulin factory
agreed to investigate why management was removing canvas from
the factory.⁴² At the Paramonov leather works the committee set up
control of all goods coming in and out of the factory.⁴³ At the
Petrograd Carriage-Construction company on 8 April the committee
forbade management to remove deal boards from the premises.⁴⁴ At
Rozenkrantz management denied that it had any spare materials
when asked by the War Industries Committee, but on 14 July the
works committee discovered 4,000 puds (65,520 kg) of metal which it
offered to factories standing idle.⁴⁵

By summer, factory committees were trying to share what little fuel

and raw materials there were. The Central Council of Factory
Committees took part in the various supply committees of the
government in order to get information on the state of stocks and to
ensure equitable distribution.⁴⁶ It was thus able to help factory
committees share out materials. At the Brenner works the committee
was refused a loan by the Ministry of Labour to buy raw materials
and turned to the shop stewards’ committee at Triangle works, who
agreed to loan the committee 15,000 rubles from its strike fund; the
Putilov works committee also donated some spare materials.⁴⁷ The
workers’ committee at Rozenkrantz donated some brass to the
Baranovskii and Ekval' factories, and at Sestroretsk works the
committee received some self-hardening steel from Putilov.⁴⁸ Factory
committees by the autumn were on guard against covert attempts by
management to sabotage production. While factories were being
forced to close because of metal-shortages, the administrations at the
Duflon works, the Markov box factory and the Nevskii wood- and
metal-processing factory were selling off stocks of metal at exorbitant
prices, with a view to closing down operations. They were stopped
from doing so by their respective factory committees.⁴⁹ At the Bezdek
sweet-factory the committee on 17 September reported its boss to the
authorities for speculative selling of sugar.⁵⁰

The activities of the factory committees in ‘controlling’ fuel and

raw materials in the enterprise were dictated by the practical need to
maintain production rather than by any desire to take over the
enterprise. As the economic crisis deepened, however, and as class
struggle intensified, the forms of workers’ control became ever more
ambitious, and the movement became more revolutionary and




contestatory. Broadly speaking, in the eight months between the
February and October, workers’ control went from being reactive,
defensive and observational to being active, offensive and interven-
tionist. From being concerned essentially to supervise production,
workers’ control developed into an attempt to actively intervene in
production and drastically limit the authority of capital. It is difficult
to periodise this trajectory precisely, for the tempo at which
individual factories moved towards a more active, aggressive style of
workers’ control varied according to the specific conditions of each
factory; but crudely speaking, workers’ control in Petrograd de-
veloped through four phases between February and October, each
linked to the different economic and political conjunctures of the
revolutionary process. In the first period of March to April, workers’
control was confined mainly to state enterprises. Factory committees
everywhere attempted to establish some control of hiring and firing,
as part of a broader drive to democratise factory relations. Employers
were optimistic about the future and prepared to make concessions.
In the second phase from May to June, most factory committees
began to monitor supplies of raw materials and fuel and to check that
their factories were being run efficiently. It was in this period that the
Bolsheviks achieved political hegemony within the movement. In the
third phase from July to August, economic crisis erupted and class
struggle deepened. Employers went onto the offensive and attempted
to curb the powers of the factory committees, some of which set up
‘control commissions’ to monitor all aspects of production, including
orders and finances. In the fourth period from September to October,
these developments were strengthened. There was a severe economic
and political crisis and class conflict polarised. Some employers tried
to close their factories and in three cases factory-committees took over
the running of their enterprises. Factory committees became actively
involved in the battle to transfer power to the Soviets, and workers’
control, as a response to economic difficulties, began to mesh with the
earlier impulses to democratise factory life, so as to produce a
movement groping towards workers’ self-management.

THE POLITICS OF WORKERS’ CONTROL: FEBRUARY TO

OCTOBER 191 7

The dominant Western interpretation of workers’ control of pro-

duction posits a dichotomy between the Bolshevik party and the




factory-committee movement. The party is seen as committed to a
centralised, statist economy, whilst the committees are portrayed as
protagonists of a decentralised economy run by the workers them-
selves. It is argued that the Bolsheviks pursued an opportunist policy
towards the movement for workers’ control, cynically supporting it
until October, not because they agreed with its aims, but because it
was creating disorder in industry and undermining the capitalist
class. Once they had gained power, however, the Bolsheviks crushed
the committees, eradicated workers’ control and reorganised the
economy on hierarchical lines. Thus Paul Avrich tells us: ‘From April
to November, Lenin had aligned himself with the Anarcho-Syndical-
ists, who desired the utter annihilation of the old order ... But after
the Bolshevik Revolution was secured, Lenin abandoned the forces of
destruction for those of centralisation and order.’⁵¹ In a more
conspiratorial vein, F.I. Kaplan writes: ‘The factory committees ...
were used by the Bolsheviks as a mask for the seizure of economic
power. The economy was to be disorganised by means of “workers’
control” of industry. Workers’ control was to have a dual function; (i)
to undermine the economy of the country so that the Provisional
Government could not efficiently function; (2) to establish the basis
for Bolshevik control over that economy.’⁵² O. Anweiler repeats the
charge that the Bolsheviks disingenuously exploited workers’ control
for their own ends: ‘The Bolsheviks furthered the syndicalist and
anarchist tendencies emerging in factory committees, whose general
aim was workers’ rule in the plants, without centralised direction
from above and without regard to the state of the national
economy.’⁵³ It seems that such a line of interpretation is funda-
mentally misguided for a number of reasons. Firstly, as argued above,
and amplified below, it is inadequate to argue that the aspirations of
the factory committees were ‘syndicalist’. Secondly, up to October,
the Bolsheviks generally were not aware of any incompatibiliy
between the workers’ control of the factory committees and state
organisation of the economy. Thirdly, to counterpose the factory
committees to the Bolshevik party is incorrect, since most of the
leading cadres of the committees were also members of the Bolshevik
party. Finally, such a counter-position suggests that there was a
uniformity of views within both the committees and the Bolshevik
party which did not in fact exist.

What follows is not an attempt to analyse the political debates

about control in detail, but rather to disclose the problematic of such
debates and to discuss some of their implications.




Menshevik, SR and anarchist perspectives on control of the economy

The Menshevik and SR demand for state control of the economy was

proffered as a solution to the severe crisis racking Russian industry.
The left-wing Menshevik economist, F.A. Cherevanin, diagnosed the
severity of the crisis at the First Conference of Petrograd Factory
Committees in the following terms: ‘The economic life of Russia has
reached a terrifying state of collapse. The country is already edging
towards a catastrophe which threatens destitution and unemploy-
ment to the mass of the population and renders futile every struggle of
the working masses to improve their position.’⁵⁴ He explained this
chaos in terms of the structural strain imposed on the economy by the
war, rather than in terms of conscious ‘sabotage’ by the capitalists.⁵⁵
The solution which he proposed was:

Planned intervention by the state in economic life via regulation of the
distribution of raw materials, fuel and equipment between branches of
production; via equal distribution of articles of consumption among the
population; via forced trustification of the basic branches of production; via
control of the banks, the fixing of prices, profits and wages and increased
taxation of capitalist incomes.⁵⁶

The Mensheviks utterly rejected ‘workers’ control’ as a serious

strategy for controlling the economy. They believed that the Bolshe-
viks had popularised the slogan purely as a demagogic device. As a
strategy for dealing with economic chaos, they considered it to be a
recipe for disaster. Workers’ control encouraged decentralised,
spontaneous initiatives by atomised groups of workers in individual
enterprises and its net effect could only be to exacerbate economic
chaos.⁵⁷ What was required was planned, centralised, all-embracing
control of the economy, and only the state had at its disposal an
apparatus adequate to this task. It was only through the state that the
whole of democracy — and not just the working class — could
participate in a massive public effort at economic control. The
Mensheviks, supported by the SRs, favoured the representation of all
popular organisations on government organs of economic regulation.
They disliked the factory committees for being both parochial and
narrowly proletarian, and argued that even at factory level control of
management should involve not just the committees but representa-
tives of government and ‘revolutionary democracy’.⁵⁸

The official position of the SR party was very similar to that of the

Mensheviks. They too believed in state control of the economy rather
than in workers’ control, but their reasons were somewhat different.




The SRs objected in principle to one class - the working class —
controlling the economy in its own interests. All popular forces should
be involved in the business of control and this could best be done via
the state, ‘because only the state is the representative of the interests
of both the producers and consumers’.⁵⁹ The SRs considered that the
factory committees had the job of controlling hiring and firing, but
denied them any privileged role in the control of production. They
believed that workers’ control as practised by the factory committees
was leading to the atomisation of the economy and to conflict between
the working class and the peasantry.⁶⁰ The SRs, however, were a
profoundly divided party and opinion within the party was as divided
on the question of workers’ control as on all other major questions of
the day. The left wing of the party rejected out of hand calls for state
control of the economy, but was unhappy with the notion of workers’
control. Some Left SRs, such as V.M. Levin, the most notable SR in
the Petrograd factory committee movement, propounded a notion of
workers’ control identical to that of the Bolsheviks, but the Left SR
newspaper demanded ‘public control’ of the economy - by producers
and consumers - via the factory committees, trade unions, coopera-
tives, etc.⁶¹ Other Left SRs called for control by the ‘toiling people’.
The heterodox SR Maximalists called for the socialisation of the
factories, to be run by elected committees, but control of production
by the factory committees until this came about.⁶²

The attitude of the anarchists and syndicalists to workers’ control

of production varied. At the First Factory Committee Conference
Zhuk presented a mild resolution which called on the ‘toiling people’
(truzhenik-narod) ‘to take the organisation of their fate into their hands’
and ‘quickly to create control commissions which will not only strictly
monitor the running of the enterprise, but regulate the activity of the
enterprise’.⁶³ Other anarchists, however, demanded the seizure of
factories by workers as a direct act of expropriation of the bourgeoisie.
Naturally, they rejected any notion of state organisation of the
economy — some going so far as to reject any kind of centralised
coordination. The key concept was that of producers’ communes
linked into federations. Factory committees were seen as the embryos
of such communes, whereas trade unions were seen as vestiges of
capitalist society at best, or ‘living corpses’ at worst.⁶⁴ Syndicalists,
unlike their confreres in Western Europe, tended to prefer the factory
committees to the trade unions, though some toyed with the idea of
federations of autonomous unions rather than of factory committees.




The Bolsheviks and workers’ control

The Bolshevik party had no position on the question of workers’

control prior to 1917. They began to formulate a position in response
to deepening turmoil in the economy. Because the party’s ideas were
in a process of formation, there is no absolute clarity, still less
uniformity, in its attempts to come to terms with the movement for
workers’ control. Lenin was the outstanding policy-maker in the
party and it is largely through his writings that one can chart the
development of Bolshevik policy, but it should not be assumed that
party members habitually kow-towed to him. For clarity of argument,
it will be assumed that Lenin represents official party thinking on
workers’ control, but later attention will be drawn to differences of
thinking within the party.

In the period up to October a bitter debate raged around the

question of control of the economy. This is usually presented as a
debate between the Menshevik advocates of a statist solution to
Russia’s economic problems and the Bolshevik supporters of an
anti-statist, grass-roots movement for workers’ control of production.
This is misleading, since it suggests that the key point at issue
between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks was whether control of
the economy should be implemented by the state or by the workers in
situ. Yet the Bolsheviks never deviated before or after October from a
commitment to a statist, centralised solution to economic disorder.
The disagreement between the two wings of the socialist movement
was not about state control in the abstract, but about what kind of
state should coordinate control of the economy: a bourgeois state or a
workers’ state? In May 1917 Lenin wrote: ‘“State control” — we are
for it. But by whom? Who is in control? The bureaucrats [chinovniki]?
Or the Soviets?’⁶⁵ Unlike the Mensheviks, Lenin and the Bolsheviks
resolutely refused to support initiatives undertaken by the Provisional
Government to control economic chaos, not because they preferred
demotic to governmental initiatives, but because they believed that,
as a bourgeois government, its initiatives must necessarily be at the
expense of working people. Even if the government sincerely tried to
restore economic order, its measures would be either totally ineffec-
tive or, if more radical, would be sabotaged by capitalist interests.
The fond hopes of the Mensheviks and SRs for state control of the
economy in the general interest completely overlooked the class
dimension of this control. This was the crux of the disagreement




between the two wings of the socialist movement. ‘In essence’, wrote
Lenin, ‘the whole question of control boils down to who controls
whom, i.e. which class is controlling and which is being controlled ...
We must resolutely and irrevocably pass over to control over the
landowners antj the capitalists by the workers and peasants.’⁶⁶ This
was the nub of Bolshevik support for workers’ control of the economy
against the state control advocated by the Mensheviks and SRs.

The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks did not disagree radically in the

specific measures which they advocated for control of the economy. In
a pamphlet written in September 1917, entitled The Impending
Catastrophe and How to Fight It, Lenin summarised the major measures
which were necessary. By far the most important, in his eyes, was the
nationalisation of the banks, since no order could be brought into the
economy unless the state had a firm hold on the nation’s purse-
strings. Second in importance, were measures to nationalise the
largest syndicates in industries such as sugar, oil, coal and metal-
lurgy. In addition, industrialists and traders should be forced to join
syndicates in order to facilitate government control. Finally, the
whole population should be compulsorily organised into consumer
societies to facilitate the distribution of subsistence commodities.⁶⁷
Lenin stressed in this pamphlet that there was absolutely nothing
original in these concrete proposals: his sole point was to emphasise
that these very simple measures could only be implemented once the
working class wielded state power. If Lenin understood these
measures as measures of‘workers’ control’, it is clear that he is here
using the term in a very different sense from that of the factory
committees. The proposals which he is advocating are thoroughly
statist and centralist in character, whereas the practice of the factory
committees was essentially local and autonomous. Should we con-
clude from this that Lenin never believed in workers’ control in any
sense other than as a counter-slogan to demands for state control?

The factory committees launched the slogan of workers’ control of

production quite independently of the Bolshevik party. It was not
until May that the party began to take it up. Lenin had cleared an
ideological space for the slogan in the April Theses, when he had
demanded: ‘Such measures as the nationalisation of land, of all banks
and capitalist syndicates, or at least, the establishment of immediate
control of them by the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, etc. - measures
which do not in any way constitute the ‘introduction’ of socialism.’⁶⁸
For a time, the Bolsheviks talked of control by the soviets: a leaflet put




out at the beginning of May by the Lesnovskii subdistrict committee
of the party, for example, called for the ‘establishment of control by
soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies over the production and
distribution of products’.⁶⁹ As yet little mention was made of the
factory committees. Only in May did the Bolshevik party begin to pay
attention to the committees.

It was Lenin, no less, who drafted the resolution on the economic

crisis and workers’ control which was put to the First Conference of
Factory Committees by G. Zinov'ev, and passed by 297 votes to 21,
with 44 abstentions.⁷⁰ This resolution was the first official formula-
tion of policy on workers’ control by the factory committees, but it was
titled ‘resolution on measures to combat disruption in the economy’,
and in fact had little to say about the factory committees or the
practice of workers’ control at enterprise level. The resolution
attacked attempts at bureaucratic regulation of the economy by the
bourgeois state, and called for a national system of workers’ control of
production and distribution. Workers’ control was conceived as
operating principally at national level, in the spheres of banking,
exchange between town and countryside, labour discipline, labour
allocation and workers’ defence. Control was to be implemented by
assigning to workers’ representatives two-thirds (three-quarters, in
Lenin’s original draft) of the places in all institutions regulating the
economy, such as the Factory Conventions and the supply-
committees. Although the wording of the resolution was vague, it
appears that factory committees and trade unions were to exercise
control at factory level by investigating company accounts and order
books, but it was not intended that workers should sit on boards of
management in the factories.⁷¹ One might sum up the perspective of
Lenin’s resolution as one of‘state workers’ control’, i.e. of workers’
control operating via worker representation on the official organs of
economic regulation.

Although Lenin envisaged workers’ control as operating princi-

pally at the level of central and local government, this did not
preclude its operation at the grass roots. Up to the beginning of 1918,
Lenin saw absolutely no contradiction between centralised control
and the creative initiatives of workers in the factories; indeed, he
never tired of insisting that local initiatives were the bedrock of
centralised control. It was precisely the creativity of the masses which
qualitatively distinguished workers’ control from the reactionary
bureaucratic control of the bourgeois state: